The present invention generally relates to electronic filing systems, and more particularly to an electronic filing system having a database building function and capable of processing image data including storage, retrieval, display and printing of the image data.
The electronic filing system refers to various information processing systems such as personal computers, office computers, desk top publishing (DTP) systems and data processing systems having image data processing functions.
When filing image data in the conventional electronic filing system, the image data is input to the system from an image scanner for each document. The input image data is stored in a secondary memory means, and at the same time, retrieval information related to the stored image data such as the document title is also input to a database.
When inputting related image data such as the case where one document is made up of a plurality of pages, the retrieval information and the input image data are related by the operator. For this reason, there is a problem in that a registration process cannot be carried out simply and quickly.
In order to eliminate the above described problem, it is conceivable to carry out an automatic database building using an optical character reader (OCR). According to this conceivable system, a predetermined area is recognized by the OCR, and a recognition result is registered as the retrieval information.
The majority of documents include a plurality of pages of image data. For this reason, it is desirable to file the image data related to a plurality of pages of one document in such a manner that the image data can be stored and retrieved as one related data. However, the image data related to the plurality of pages of one document may not necessarily always include the data which is required as the retrieval information. In this case, it is impossible to automatically relate the data for each page of the document.
In other words, it can be said that the document in general consists of a plurality of pages in most cases. Furthermore, in most cases, the data required as the retrieval information is not included in all of the image data related to the plurality of pages of the document.
In addition, even when the data required as the retrieval information is included in all of the image data related to the plurality of pages of the document, the image data related to the plurality of pages are processed as mutually independent documents unless the image data include data for indicating that the image data relate to the same document for use as the retrieval information. But it is evident that it is desirable to realize a database structure such that the document including a plurality of pages is processed as a single document.
The conventional electronic filing system can only register one document in one document registration process. On the other hand, even in the conceivable system which uses the OCR for recognizing each document, the data required for making the retrieval information is rarely included in all the related image data. Therefore, there are problems in that the burden on the operator increases and the processing efficiency upon document registration is poor.